Going Native

I overheard some American college girl conversation this other evening at the university cafetaria.
From the bits and scraps I heard, I couldn't make out whether they were talking about some real life experience or if it was something out of young adult fiction.  There was talk of some young man having thrown up during sex, and the disgusted young woman running out of the room covered in nothing but  puke-covered sheets.  I couldn't even gather from their mannerisms whether the intended effect of this narrative was wacky humor, shock-and-awe disgust or something allegorical with a deeper postmodernist significance than I could fathom.

Do I not understand women? or Americans? Probably neither. While that may seem a bit over-generalized, I generally have the feeling that I do not understand a lot of common-sensical things about people through being very detached, a bit reclusive and bookish, and a bit too full-of-myself for most of the time I have been around. Of late I have undertaken this project to change that, and have more insight and understanding of other people, and this I go about doing by talking to random people about random things, and when natural shyness and conversational laziness prevents that, by listening to them. So this act of overhearing was in fact eavesdropping, I chose the table next to the one which seemed to have the liveliest conversation with calculated precision and my rapidly developing gossip antennae weren't too disappointed.

One of the first things that the diasporic dadas tell a freshly arrived desi in the US is that we shouldn't just stick to our own ethnic communities, but try to "explore"  - which probably is a combination of having white American buddies, going to clubs and parties with them, learning a bit of their culture, chasing some of their girls, and generally feeling somewhat acculturated with the American mainstream.  That also means appreciating (their) football, knowing a good deal about cars, learning to speak emphatically in that peculiarly confident American way, having more social mobility with respect to finding jobs, and maybe a host of other things that I can't pin down now.  All this is generally speaking good advice.  If you want to live in a foreign culture or country for an extended period of time, it's best to get acculturated and feel comfortable in it.  Of course there's nothing shameful about using one's ethnic community engendered social support system, but just incestuously sticking to one another based on little more than common native language or place of origin certainly has significant drawbacks.

This reminds me of my college days in Kanpur - a dusty, chaotic north Indian city, with a largely industrial working class population base. My batchmates were drawn from a wide spectrum of socioeconomic classes - from the rich Delhi kid to the rural Bihari one, and  different language groups added variety to the dominant North Indian population base. Yes women were somewhat under-represented but that'd need a whole new rant. Our campus was beautiful. Modern buildings, airconditioned labs, open green fields, trees, peacocks! and it provided insularity.  The community of students was large (not as huge as my American university though), and we had evolved our own campus culture. We were in most part absorbed in our coursework, our own extra-curriculars, our own labs and projects, our own brand of humor, and very significantly, our own Local Area Network. I cannot help but notice the contrast. There was little talk of gaining familiarity with  people who lived in surrounding villages, or acculturation with the lowerclass Hindi speaking mainstream, and being all horse-blinkered and racing on ahead with exams and grades was considered the virtuous norm. Yes there was an oddball minority of people worrying about minimum wages and village kids' education, but the vast majority of us didn't feel very connected to it.  These days when I see the ingratiatingly-smiling Desi in me try out bars, beaches, or biking or any of those entertaining pursuits in this Land of the Free with the Free people themselves, I wonder what are the factors at work?  Colonial hangover, natural human propensity to gravitate towards the materially richer dominant culture, obsession with the exotic and foreign, etc.? Or is it just that I have grown older and perhaps a little less cynical and mellower?